One of the few bright spots of the Republican presidential nominee process is that it offers an alternative trainwreck for those seeking diversion from their personal woes.

Marriage crumbling, debts piling up, job in jeopardy, mortgage in arrears? Look on the bright side: You could be a Republican voter stuck with a choice between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Just like that, the world looks brighter.

After the two most recent primaries, in Alabama and Mississippi, were swept by Santorum, the accepted wisdom is that the “race” has become a head-to-head battle between the former Pennsylvania senator and Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. Santorum will play the “real conservative” with the help of refugees from Newt Gingrich’s deflating campaign, while Romney tries to invent new ways to disavow his past and maintain he’s a right-winger too. Romney’s problem is that the majority of Republicans just don’t believe him, and no matter how much money he pours into the campaign seems able to convince them otherwise. Santorum’s chief liability is the presumption that he’d guarantee re-election for Barack Obama.

The Santorum candidacy pushes Republicans toward an election in which the issues are religious, cultural, and sexual, not economic. It’s a candidacy that pushes the party away from metropolitan areas, away from areas of growing population, and rebases the party everywhere that is not dynamic, not growing. The concerns of hard-pressed America are deeply worthy of attention and respect. They call for responses and solutions. That’s not what a Santorum candidacy offers. (As we’ve seen with the Santorum proposals to spur manufacturing with one single change in tax law, this is not a policy-serious campaign.) Instead, a Santorum candidacy offers an airing of resentments and grievances. Is that really where party conservatives want to go?

The answer, likely, is no, they don’t want to go there. But if the process so far has made anything clear, it’s that they also can’t bring themselves to accept the alternative.